This message is further to our announcement of August 11, 2017, with respect to terminating our business with U.S. individual customers. As indicated in the announcement, we are terminating trading, deposits, and withdrawal functionality for U.S. individual customers by no later than November 9, 2017. U.S. customers are already barred from receiving financing from other users on Bitfinex’s peer-to-peer financing platform. This restriction will remain and, in addition, U.S. individual customers will no longer be able to provide financing on Bitfinex effective November 9, 2017.

The reason given by Bitfinex for this decision is mainly because of tougher regulations imposed by US authorities. Another probable reason is the recent lawsuit by Bitfinex against Wells Fargo over bank transfer freeze. Will they do the same for other countries such as Russia who plans on having a national crypto Ruble?

Maybe we’ll need to explore new ways of trading. I strongly believe that to get around this problem, we might need to develop decentralized applications that will allow trading without interference by centralized exchanges.

Now the question remains if Bitfinex will keep pairings with the US dollar. Would it be logical to keep the US currency in pairings or will they simply decide to use another currency such as the Euro? This writer is wondering if that will ever happen. It’s sort of a paradox to ban US customers but still use their currency for doing business.